Free Republic

Much propaganda is thrown against Israel in the "information war" but no subject is highlighted more than a tragic friendly-fire incident which occurred between Israel and the US almost 40 years ago. US Florida Judge Jay Cristol was responsible for having successfully petitioned the NSA to release US data confirming the accident. Cristol believes that Israel's enemies have tried to use this incident for decades to create a wedge between Washington and Jerusalem. Judge Cristol, in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post explains what happened to the USS Liberty and discusses the relevance of the new information released by...

New documents released by the State Department relating to the period of the 1967 Six Day War include CIA memos that say Israel did not know it was striking an American vessel when it attacked the USS Liberty off the coast of the Gaza Strip on June 8, 1967, killing 34 American sailors and injuring 172. The memos say the attack was carried out "by mistake, representing gross negligence." Along with the release of the documents, the historian for the top-secret National Security Agency said Monday he believed available evidence "strongly suggested" Israel did not know it was bombarding an...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Reviewing documents covering 36 years, the State Department concluded Monday that Israel's attack on the U.S. spy ship Liberty during the 1967 Six Day War was an act of Israeli negligence. The United States also was negligent, a State Department official said, for failing to notify Israel that the electronic intelligence-gathering ship was cruising international waters off the Egyptian coast and for failing to withdraw the Liberty from the war zone. A daylong conference that studied fresh documents as well as the established record failed to produce a consensus for any of three views voiced most often:...

At 1:58 pm on June 8, 1967, Capt. Yiftach Spector lined up his Mirage IIICJ fighter jet above the USS Liberty and raked it from bow to stern with his armored-piercing bullets from his 30 mm guns. Even now, 37 years later, the attack by the Air Force on the American spy ship on the fourth day of the Six Days' War fuels the fire of intrigue, conspiracy and cover-up theories. Nevertheless, what follows is powerful evidence that the attack was a tragic mistake. The Israel Air Force archives have audiotapes of the radio transmissions made prior, during and after...

An Israeli pilot who mistakenly attacked the American intelligence ship USS Liberty during the 1967 Six Day War said they were lucky he had no bombs – otherwise he would have sunk her. "There was a mistake. Mistakes happen. As far as I know, the mistake was of the USS Liberty being there in the first place," said Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yiftah Spector. After 36 years Spector, who this week was dismissed by the IAF for signing the pilots' refusal letter protesting the policy of targeted killings, agreed to speak to a reporter for the first time on his role in...

Speeaking at the 19th annual Rabin memorial rally Saturday night, former president Shimon Peres issued scathing criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the peace process with the Palestinians and of his government’s approach to the conflict. “There are those who have turned the word ‘peace’ into a derogatory term, and there are those who consider ‘peace supporters’ as delusional people,” declared Peres. “I say clearly today: Those who have given up on peace are the delusional ones. Those who gave up and stopped looking for peace. they’re the naive ones, the ones who are not patriots,” Peres added...

Eggypt’s Religious Endowments Minister accused “Zionist forces” of promoting atheism and homosexuality in his country. Speaking with Al-Hayat TV, an Evangelical Arabic-language television station, Mohammed Mokhtar Gomaa said “colonial Zionist forces” support “atheists and atheism and finance homosexuals and homosexuality” in an effort to fragment Egyptian society. The interview, which took place in September, was published Sunday by MEMRI, a Washington-based Middle Eastern media watchdog group. Gomaa is a cabinet member in the Sissi government, which coordinates closely with Israel on security and economic issues. …

PARIS (AP) -- Iraq's president says Arab powers Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia do not need to join airstrikes against the Islamic State group. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, President Fouad Massoum also expressed regret that Iran was not invited to take part in the 26-nation conference in Paris on Monday to try to counter the Islamic extremists who control vast parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria. The conference of mostly Western and Arab world countries and the five permanent U.N. Security Council members aims to show a united front, especially from majority-Muslim nations....

Fire destroyed the terminal at Tripoli's main airport on Sunday, one day after it was seized by militia fighters from the Libyan city of Misrata, witnesses said. Unidentified war planes also attacked targets in the capital, residents said, the latest stage of the worst fighting in Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Tripoli residents heard jets followed by explosions at dawn but more details were not immediately available. (SNIP) Misrata forces have blamed the air strikes on Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, two countries which have cracked down on Islamists. Libya's government says it does not...

An oil and gas group exploring offshore Israel said on Sunday it may have discovered a field that contains an estimated 2.5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas and 255 million barrels of oil. About 30 tcf of gas have been discovered off Israel's Mediterranean coast in recent years, turning the country once dependent on energy imports into a potential exporter. The latest announcement, which was based on 3D seismic data from 2012, covers the Oz license some 50 km (30 miles) from the coastal city of Herzliya in water 1,150 meters (yards) deep.

The Pentagon brass placed in charge of implementing Obama’s war against ISIS are getting fed up with the short leash the White House put them on. Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army. As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained...

Hezbollah is many times more dangerous than the terrorist organizations in Gaza, Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan, the outgoing head of the IDF’s Northern Command, told Army Radio on Wednesday. He warned Israelis not to expect the same level of air defense cover that the South and Center of the country received during the war with Hamas in Gaza City this summer...

On Thursday, Sweden finally solved all the problems in the Middle East by recognizing the State of Palestine. For decades all the instability in the region had been blamed on the lack of a PLO state. Foreign policy experts stood in line to tell us all that the only thing that could end terrorism in the Middle East was a terrorist state. .... It was a plan so crazy that it was bound to either work or kill a lot of people. Mostly it’s done the latter. .... Sweden’s new Palestine not only dispensed with elections, routing the business of...

One day after the Swedish government officially recognized the state of Palestine, members of the Parliament, Riksdagen, disagreed on whether this decision was right or “immature”. The leftist government, which took office only a month ago after winning national elections in September, on Thursday (30 October) became the first European country to recognize the state of Palestine. This prompted Israel to recall its ambassador to Sweden to Jerusalem on the same day. The country also threatened that further cuts to the two countries’ diplomatic relations can be expected. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sweden “needs to understand that relations...

And the schoolbooks are just one small part of the UNRWA/Hamas symbiosis in Gaza. “As usual, the question is – is anyone listening?” Apparently not Malala Yousafzai. “UNRWA-Hamas Symbiosis Detailed in New Film,” Arutz Sheva, October 29, 2014 (thanks to Inexion): In a new documentary video entitled UNRWA Goes to War, journalist David Bedein builds a seemingly incontestable case against UNRWA, showing the close symbiotic relations between it and the terror group Hamas. The video shows that not only did UNRWA schools serve as repositories for rockets in the last Gaza war, and not only were rockets launched from places...

The same Tuesday night that a senior official in US President Barack Obama's administration was quoted calling Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "chickens**t," yet more officials indicated the US is warming up to cooperation with Iran - the Islamic regime seeking nuclear weapons that has repeatedly declared its desire to destroy Israel. Senior US and Arab officials were cited by the Wall Street Journal saying that in recent months, America and Iran have grown closer through cooperation against their "common enemy", the Islamic State (ISIS), as well as over a shared interest in "stability" in Iraq and Afghanistan. American officials revealed...

Egypt responded strongly to a Hamas jihadi terror attack that killed 30 Egyptians soldiers, with helicopter strikes, a curfew of 100,000 people, and the announcement they are going build a security wall.  to control the border with Gaza.  Unlike President Obama, Egyptian President Al-Sisi has no trouble identifying the enemy and didn’t feel the need to assure people that Islamic terrorists are lone wolves, representing nothing and no one.  Instead he asserted the attack was supported by foreign forces.  He vowed to protect the lives of Egyptian military at home and to pursue an “extensive war” against the jihadists,...

After a terror attack on Friday killed at least 30 Egyptian soldiers in the northern Sinai, Cairo has declared a state of emergency in the area, closed down the Rafah crossing from Gaza, canceled indirect cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, and now says it will build a wall to block smuggling with the coastal enclave, Israel’s NRG News reported. Egyptian air force helicopter forces said they had killed five militants in strikes in the vicinity on Sunday, Israel Radio reported. Additionally, there in a sunset to sunrise curfew in the area affecting over 100,000 residents, according to Army radio....

The destruction of the widespread Hamas tunnel network was considered a major Israeli achievement of the recent war in Gaza, but the Hamas weekly newspaper Al-Risalah reports that Hamas continues digging tunnels from Gaza into Israel. A reporter for Al-Risalah claims to have visited an “offensive tunnel”—a term referring to an underground conduit planned to be used in an attack against Israel. Hamas has attacked Israel via tunnels of this nature in the past, either by sending armed terrorists into Israel to target Israelis, or—as in the famous case of Gilad Shalit—by capturing a soldier nearby and abducting him into...

An Israeli firm will supply Egypt with natural gas, a company spokesman said Monday, more than two years after sabotage halted the flow of Egyptian gas to Israel. For more than a decade Israel relied on Egypt for roughly 40 percent of its gas needs in line with an export accord signed in 2005 by the two countries which are bound by a peace treaty. But in April 2012 Egypt annulled the contract, saying Israel had not met the financial obligations of the agreement, in a decision that came amid a spate of bomb attacks that targeted the pipeline used...